Artistic/Entertainment Value

Moral/Spiritual Value

Age Appropriateness

MPAA Rating

Caveat Spectator

I really wanted to like The Green Mile.
I really did. Partly just because in general I want movies to be
good (who sits down at a movie thinking "I hope this is really
bad"?). Partly because it stars Tom Hanks, who exudes likability
and who deserves credit for the thoughtful film choices that have
made him the most successful actor of the last decade, and also
because it stars Michael Clarke Duncan, who like Hanks elicits
goodwill. Partly because, like the popular Shawshank
Redemption, The Green Mile is a prison film directed by Frank
Darabont from a Stephen King story, and it’s nice to see
lightning strike twice. And also partly because I was intrigued
by the film’s promise of spiritual overtones and Christian
imagery.

And, in fact, The Green Mile is not unpleasantly or
oppressively bad. In a lot of ways it’s like the mysterious
character played by Duncan: immense, ponderous, elusively
spiritual, dimwitted to be sure, but so well-meaning and
good-hearted that any criticism or persecution seems somehow mean
and unfair. The great difference between the man and the movie is
that Duncan’s character never asked or wanted to be anything
special, yet he was; while The Green Mile desperately
wants to be important, meaningful, and uplifting, and it isn’t.
Thus, while Duncan’s character was wrongly sentenced to die,
The Green Mile deserves its lumps.

Other critics have already criticized the film on several
fronts: social, aesthetic, cultural. In keeping with the general
principles of this site, I’ll give priority to the spiritual and
religious implications of the story. At the heart of The Green
Mile is a powerful, compelling figure of almost preternatural
innocence and goodness whose origins are obscure — one character
describes him as having "fallen from the sky" — and who possesses
a mysterious power to take the suffering of others upon himself.
He is also able to weigh men’s hearts, and is startlingly capable
of judgment and vengeance as well as mercy and healing.

For all his power, he suffers terribly under the weight of the
world’s hatred and violence. Though he does no wrong, he is
wrongly sentenced to die and executed. He dies offering his
executioners forgiveness, his mind already on heaven. His
initials are J. C., and, though John Coffey is not an allegory of
Jesus Christ like Aslan or the Lamb of Revelation, nevertheless
he is obviously a Christlike figure, who, like such figures as
Frodo, King Arthur, and King David, embodies many qualities and
attributes that find their ultimate realization in our Lord.

All of this is fine so far as it goes. But how far is that?
Consider, first of all, that those whose lives Coffey touches may
find relief from physical ailments, but their hearts and spirits
seem strangely untransformed. They are moved by John Coffey’s
goodness, to be sure, but seem no freer, more hopeful, or nobler
for the experience.

Even Paul Edgecomb (Hanks, at times sounding more like Forrest
Gump than any character who is meant to have all his faculties
should sound), who is Coffey’s closest "believer" and recipient
of his most remarkable gift, is in the end left with guilt,
loneliness, and despair. Though the film claims Coffey "infected
him with life," Edgecomb looks forward only to death, with no
implication that death for him means anything other than release
from the sorrows of this vale of tears. (There’s a scene early in
the film when a condemned man [Graham Greene] on his way to the
electric chair asks Edgecomb whether he believes that those who
repent of their wrongdoing can look forward to a heaven of
eternally inhabiting their happiest memory; and Edgecomb solemnly
tells him, "I just ’bout believe that very thing." But then the
next condemned man to die is an eccentric old coot [Michael
Jeter] whose only concern is for the fate of the mouse he has
tamed, and Edgecomb and the other guards with equal solemnity
assure him that his mouse will be taken to a nonexistent mouse
circus in Florida; and whatever weight Edgecomb’s words of
comfort to the first prisoner might have had evaporates.)

Even John Coffey’s own death, though moving, is also oddly
hollow. In life Coffey’s sufferings are redemptive, bringing
healing to others; but his death brings nothing to anyone, except
again release for himself from the torments of life. Indeed,
though he extends forgiveness to his executioners, including
Edgecomb, his death becomes for Edgecomb a source of crushing
guilt and sorrow that he continues to carry decades later; which
is probably more or less the same effect Good Friday would have
had on the disciples had it not been followed by Easter
Sunday.

Make no mistake: This is not simply a theological quarrel. My
complaint with The Green Mile is not simply that it fails
as Christian allegory, but that it fails as uplifting or profound
storytelling of any kind. It tells us about a force that Hank’s
character describes as "one of God’s miracles," yet this "miracle
of God" brings none of the characters closer either to any vision
or understanding of God or to greater understanding of
themselves; it brings no faith; offers no hope; illuminates no
truth (beyond obvious platitudes such as "people hurt one
another" and "miracles happen"). It’s the story of a martyr who
dies for no cause, of a wonder-worker with the power to do great
good who allows himself to be put to death for no better reason
than that he’s tired of people hurting one another and (once his
last request to see a "flicker-show" is granted) can think of
nothing in particular he’d want out of life anyway. Not that I
necessarily fault Coffey for his willingness to die; but neither
do I think that his story is particularly worth telling, except
as a curiosity.

And The Green Mile aspires to be about much more than a
curiosity. In its epic length, its stately pacing, its flashback
storytelling bookended by a prologue and epilogue of the Hanks
character as an old man, its dramatic slow-motion shots of lights
exploding, its Christological themes and other spiritual imagery
(a St. Christopher medal, a healing touch, evil made visible as a
swarm of insects, judgment issuing forth from the mouth of a
supernatural being), The Green Mile telegraphs its weighty
intentions — intentions it cannot remotely deliver on.

And I haven’t yet begun to touch upon the many other respects
in which the film invites criticism: The socio-historical
implausibility of Edgecomb and his team of enlightened, gentle,
liberal death-row guards existing in 1935 Louisiana; the dubious
racial-political implications of a story centered on what one
critic called a "magic black man" who serves white men (all of
whom he addresses as "boss"), taking their hardship upon himself,
and then dies while absolving them of all guilt; the narrative
problem of a story that doesn’t tell the audience up-front what
kind of story it is, what the rules of the universe are,
introducing its supernatural element only after the film is a
good bit underway; the manipulative methodology of the film, in
which every character that is not pure and good is repulsive and
loathsome, and commits atrocity after atrocity simply to get the
audience clamoring for his punishment; or even the odd recurrence
of the theme of urination, in which, by my count, three different
male characters engage in at least half a dozen acts of
peeing.

And yet it’s too well-made to be really bad or unwatchable.
The acting is uniformly good, and although the story is long and
languorous, it’s hard to point to particular scenes that are just
padding or dead wood. There are three actual executions (and two
rehearsals) that take up more time than you might think, but it
all serves the plot; and the middle execution especially, in
which something goes awry, is so horrifying that the very
possibility of such a thing happening seems a powerful argument
against at least this form of capital punishment. There are other
standout scenes as well: When Coffey is spirited out of prison to
heal a dying character, he becomes something like a force of
nature; and the film has a few surprises that are genuinely
powerful and arresting. And it’s refreshing to watch a film in
which the characters take for granted the assumptions of their
Christian culture.

But there’s no payoff. Even the secret of Coffey’s final gift
to Edgecomb conveys no sense of wonder or significance. In the
end, I came away from this film without anything in particular I
could point to that made the experience worthwhile, yet also
without a sense of having wasted three hours of my life. The
positive and negative factors seem to me to pretty much exactly
cancel one another out, leaving me with a film that I am no more
able to recommend seeing or avoiding than I was before I saw
it.